Why We Need a New Mythology to Save Our Future – Jens Budinger 🇬🇧

Every great civilization has been shaped by a defining mythology – a narrative architecture that gives its people a moral compass, a sense of purpose, and a reason to endure. From the epic heroes of the Bronze Age to the compassionate divinity of the Iron Age, these stories didn’t just entertain, they governed how humanity understood itself. We no longer have that. The Enlightenment promised illumination and later delivered nihilism. Science killed God but offered nothing to fill the void. Popular culture cannibalizes its own myths, dressing old corpses in new clothes and calling it progress. And in the absence of a shared moral and spiritual bedrock, we are left with virtue signalling, franchise mediocrity, and a civilizational crisis of meaning. This lecture argues that we are at a mythological inflection point, and that what comes next cannot be retrofitted from what came before. It must be built from scratch, self-aware of its own finality, capable of holding paradox, and rooted not in divine authority but in the full and costly complexity of being human. The new mythology won’t give you a hero to worship. It will give you a mirror you can’t look away from.

Hall: Atelier